Real News: Digital Public Library of America goes live today with StackLife

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a major step in making major digitized collections available in one place on the Web. Today the DPLA announces the following:

At its launch this week, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is featuring StackLife DPLA as an example of how the DPLA’s collection of books can be mashed up with other collections and browsed in highly innovative ways.

StackLife DPLA, launched today by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, lets users find and freely read 1.7 million books from the DPLA, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive’s Open Library.

StackLife DPLA enables users to browse via scrollable virtual shelves that cluster—and can instantly re-cluster—books based on their multiple subject areas. With a click, a user can read the book online.

The depth of color of a book on a StackLife DPLA shelf indicates how often a work has been read. The length of that image of the book indicates how long ago it was published and its thickness indicates how many pages are in it.

For all those who are aware of digital book collections, the inclusion of the Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive's Open Library are significant advances. The official launch of the website is at Noon Eastern Time, 18 April 2013.